Q6

[catherinem88]

I can see how the answer is D, but I could not eliminate B. Can someone help me out.

D- there has been success is fire suppression efforts, hence fires have been kept out of forests; as a result, if a natural fire (lightning) was to be started now, it would lead to total devastation. (Lines 20-23; 27-31) Yup, I understand that.

However for B,
-having fires set by natural occurring lightning is important for the new wildlife management. (Lines 50-54)

Can someone shed some light on it? Thanks in advance.

[tangdanni422]

From lines 51-52, we know that the new forest management strategy can allow fires set by lightning to burn WHEN the risk of extensive damage can be reduced enough.

The stem is asking about a policy in which ALL forest fires set by lightning were allowed to burn UNTIL they die out NATURALLY. This policy is too extreme. It is definitely not allowed since we are told that many forests have been free of fire for 50 years or longer and therefore the fuels accumulated can be enough for some devastating fires. So both (A) and (B) can be eliminated because such a somewhat extreme policy is neither viable nor essential under current circumstances.

[rinagoldfield]

Excellent explanation tangdanni422! I completely agree that the policy described by the question step is too extreme to be supported by the author.

[andrewgong01]

I remember taking the test and I recalled reading the conditional on lightning should be allowed only under certain conditions and wondered if that was enough of a qualification to justify "D" cause the author overall was in support of lightening . And then I went with "C" because I thought "C" was easier to support . However, would we mark "C" wrong for scope issues because the author never talks about lightening directly in the context of helping 100 year+old trees and, more importantly, never said anything about "younger forests" in the passage ( unless the "fuel" in the passage was considered younger forest). It just feels like overall the author was in support of lightening (with caveats) and "C" looked like an attractive (trap) answer that seems reasonable to infer

[AmyH231]

For me the key word in this question was “all.” We know that the policy stated in the third paragraph is clearly not all fires started by lightning—only fires that are started when the weather is damp enough. This was the only way I ended up eliminating A and B.